Georgia Elizabeth Kauffman was born on October 6, 1902, in Mifflin, Pennsylvania. Her father, Allen R. Kauffman was a telephone operator for the Pennsylvania Railroad. She attended Mifflintown High School from 1915-1919 and the Dickinson Seminary in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, from 1919-1920, before enrolling in Mount Holyoke College in 1920. At Mount Holyoke, she majored in English Literature with a minor in English. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924, she taught French and English at the High School in Brattleboro, Vermont from 1924-1926. On June 11, 1926 she married Clayton L. Piggott, a printer. In 1927 she had a daughter, Eleanor Katharine (who later graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1948) and in 1928 had another daughter, Margaret Hilton. She began teaching again at a nursery school in Brattleboro in 1930. In 1932 she moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and became the nursery school director at the Seller School; she remained there until 1935. In 1934 she divorced Piggott, and on September 12, 1935, she married John Paul Selsam, an assistant professor of history at the State College of Pennsylvania. After her husband died in 1950, Selsam remained active in the affairs of the State College of Pennsylvania, acting as an assistant to the Music Department and chaperoning a choir tour of Europe. She died on October 16, 1997 in Newtown, Pennsylvania at the age of ninety-five.